Frequently, the manufacture of equipment requires that components of a portion of the equipment must be welded together. Based on the nature of the equipment, its use, the environment that the equipment will be used in, the weld must meet several design specifications. Additionally, the weld specifications may be limited by the manner in which the two parts to be weld fit together.
The equipment may be designed by a design engineer, who designs the part to meet specified design requirements. The design requirements may specify or require a specific weld, i.e., weld type and parameters.
Thus, the equipment may be built or assembled using the specified weld. However, the design engineer usually does not consider how the weld is to be performed, e.g., the steps that must be performed to weld the two parts together. The steps may include locate or positioning of parts, the performance of partial welds or welds completed in a number of passes so that the parts do not become malformed. Additionally, the design engineer may not recognize the time required to perform a given weld. All of this may be considered in budgeting for the manufacture of the equipment, as well as determining how much equipment and how many welders (persons or robots) will be required to manufacture the equipment (taking into account actual or estimated numbers of equipment to be manufactured).
Generally, the steps to perform a given weld must be worked out manually. The steps are generated based on the parts to be weld (including the geometry of the parts, weight, etc. . . . ), the specified weld, and the design requirements. These steps are usually generated by a weld expert who must compile all of the required information and manually generate the steps which are then followed by the welder or welders during manufacture of the equipment. This tends to be a cumbersome, lengthy, expensive, and sometimes unreliable process.
The present invention is aimed at overcoming one or more of the promises identified above.